The government initially seemed unperturbed because parliament had built almost insurmountably high hurdles into the referendum law. 10,000 signatures had to be collected within ten days, then another 300,000 within six weeks – far more than in Switzerland. Baudet's allies from the right-wing satirical blog Geen Stijl, which describes its brand of journalism as "biased, baseless and gratuitously offensive", came up with a solution. The bloggers developed an app with which to sign the petition online, whereupon the referendum committee printed out the signed forms and submitted them to the electoral authorities. This method was controversial, but a court dismissed a lawsuit against the right-wing bloggers.

The reality is somewhat more complicated. The Dutch "no" to the EU-Ukraine association agreement had put the government in a very tricky political position. On the domestic front, the referendum was not binding, but it couldn’t just be ignored. On the foreign policy front, Rutte couldn’t afford to simply scrap the association agreement, which was backed by all the other EU states and had already provisionally come into force. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians waving European flags had taken to the streets of Kiev in late 2013 for their right to conclude an association agreement with the EU – and paid dearly for their revolution with Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the ensuing conflict in eastern Ukraine. The EU partners felt obliged to show solidarity with Ukraine – and saw no reason to simply shelve the treaty on account of a Dutch advisory referendum.

After a months-long tug-of-war, Rutte did succeed in wringing a supplementary declaration from the EU partners in Brussels providing that the agreement did not give Ukraine any concrete prospects of EU accession. The terms of the association agreement itself remained unchanged, however, and the agreement was ratified by the Dutch parliament all the same in 2017. After this traumatic experience, the government feared a wave of referenda against European policies – and a loss of its international reliability and capacity to govern. So it set out to end this Dutch experiment in direct democracy before it had really got started.

"The prevailing impression in Europe is that only right-wing populists have won referendums", observes Jacobs, "for which the empirical evidence is meagre". He believes that the more the Dutch experienced sometimes winning and sometimes losing referendums, the more they’d have come to accept them over time. But we’ll never know whether this prognosis would have been confirmed because, on a motion from Mark Rutte's centre-right coalition, the Dutch parliament repealed the referendum law in the summer of 2018.

Referendums alone don’t make for direct democracy

In 2016, the Economist magazine diagnosed a "referendum-mania" in Europe. While in the 1970s an average of three referendums per year were held in European countries (with the exception of Switzerland), in recent years the annual average has been eight. Several governments have indeed tried to counter the democratic recession by giving the electorate a direct say in decisionmaking. Popular votes can spark debate and heighten people’s interest in politics – as in Scotland after the 2014 independence referendum. On the other hand, many European governments have had off-putting experiences with referendums over the past few years. In countries in which the electorate are not called to the polls several times a year as in Switzerland, there is a risk that a vote on a specific issue will devolve into an outlet for general political disenchantment or a warning to the government. As Bulgarian philosopher Ivan Krastev puts it in his book After Europe, "It may be true that the government or parliament has the."

The case of Hungary also goes to show that referendums alone do not necessarily make a country more democratic. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán now and then holds plebiscites on issues that seem politically opportune to him. In the autumn of 2016, for instance, he had Hungarians vote on European refugee policy. Orbán was not interested in learning the people’s opinion – he already knew that distrust of migrants and refugees was widespread throughout the country. His object was to shore up his political standing on the domestic front and obtain a mandate to fight even harder in Brussels against all EU efforts to impose refugee quotas. The wording of the leading question on the "quota referendum" ballot speaks volumes: "Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?" Apparently, many Hungarians saw through this travesty of democracy too. Although over 90 per cent of the votes went Orbán’s way, more than half the electorate stayed home, which is why it fell short of the 50 per cent turnout required.

But the Brexit vote did not trigger a domino effect, for the political and economic turbulence caused by the vote in Britain proved too dissuasive. On the contrary, the political reality turned out to be far more complex than the promises made by the "Vote Leave" campaign. No wonder, then, that the government and parliament in Westminster manoeuvred themselves into a gridlock when it came to implementing the referendum. Still, the argument that the instruments of direct democracy are fundamentally incompatible with parliamentary democracy with parliamentary sovereignty, as in Great Britain, falls short. Referendums can provide a supplement to representational democracy as long as there are certain hurdles to prevent a spate of referendums from paralyzing the work of governance. The problems national referendums cause in international relations, however, became all too apparent during the Brexit negotiations between London and Brussels. The Brexit vote politically obliged the British government and parliament to leave the EU. But by no means did it oblige the EU to comply with London's wishes in the negotiations, especially since other member state governments have democratic mandates and are defending their own interests too. Greece had a similar experience with its referendum against the austerity measures imposed by its euro partners in 2015. So did Switzerland with its initiative to establish immigration quotas in 2014: the "yes" vote, which won by a very tight margin, compelled the Swiss Federal Council to take action in Brussels with a view to entering into negotiations with the EU. But the EU states were by no means bound to agree to such negotiations. On the one hand, Switzerland wanted to use quotas and upper limits to turn the free movement of persons into its opposite. On the other hand, it was not in the EU’s interest to risk fragmentation of the internal market on account of the Swiss vote. The decisive factor in international relations is the imbalance in economic and political power, not whether a negotiating party’s position has the support of a referendum.

National referendums on European issues put the EU in an unresolvable democratic dilemma. If the EU does not comply with a national referendum, it is considered undemocratic. But it would also be undemocratic to blindly yield to each and every national referendum. In the Dutch referendum on the Ukraine, only 30 per cent of the Netherlands’ 13 million eligible voters turned out, and roughly 60 per cent of them rejected the association agreement. If Brussels and the other EU states had buried the treaty out of respect for the people's verdict, a good 2.5 million Dutch naysayers would have decided an issue that affects 500 million citizens all over the EU and another 45 million in Ukraine.

These musings are not wholly unfounded, for the EU has already seen the first stirrings of pan-European citizens’ initiatives. The Lisbon Treaty empowers citizens who collect a million signatures to launch an initiative on EU policy and request that the EU Commission propose legislation to that effect. This European Citizens' Initiative should enable citizens to participate directly in EU policymaking – but in practice such participation is still dreaded in Brussels, as the "Stop Glyphosate" initiative, for example, goes to show.

The EU Commission’s cherry-picking approach to citizens’ initiatives threatens to stifle this new tool of direct democracy. At a summer of 2018 event in Brussels, anti-abortionist Ana del Pino denounced what she called "excessive institutional control". Pablo Sánchez Centellas, co-coordinator of the "Right2Water" initiative, called on the Commission to act on all successful initiatives by proposing legislation, which would at least give rise to debate in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. In the winter of 2018, to be sure, the European Parliament and Council of Ministers did approve a reform proposed by the EU Commission to lower the bureaucratic hurdles for initiators of citizens' petitions. But the Commission is loath to share its exclusive right to propose European legislation with citizens’ committees – even though it does have sufficient room for manoeuvre to show greater flexibility in its handling of citizens' initiatives.

Switzerland as a role model – or a deterrent?

After the Swiss "yes" vote on the 2014 initiative to curb immigration, Mario Borghezio, an MEP representing Italy’s Lega Nord, caused quite a sensation at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He unfurled a Swiss flag, began trotting across the chamber floor and interrupted the parliamentary debate shouting slogans like "Free Switzerland!" and "Stop the EU dictatorship over the people!" And that was not an isolated episode: for right-wing nationalists, Switzerland and its direct democracy are great role models, even if every now and then Swiss politicians and diplomats object to this instrumentalization.

On the whole, the Swiss electorate seldom take extreme decisions. But the relative lack of restraint in recent years has made it possible to pass initiatives introduced by the right-wing nationalist SVP to deport foreign criminals and ban minarets, initiatives that conflict with the European Convention on Human Rights, but also with fundamental rights under the Swiss constitution such as freedom of religion or the principle of proportionality. Another SVP initiative was voted on in November 2018: entitled "Schweizer Recht statt fremde Richter" (i.e. "Swiss law instead of foreign judges"), it provided that popular votes must always take precedence over international law. It would have challenged the European Convention on Human Rights and undermined the protection of fundamental rights in Switzerland. The SVP were unable to muster a majority, but it remains nonetheless crucial to rein in the will of the People. The SVP stylize the Volk into a mythical and infallible entity and discredit as anti-democratic anyone who dares to point out the limits on the will of the People.

But who are the People? As René Rhinow, a constitutional lawyer in Basel, explains, there are at least five dimensions to the Volk: the resident population (including foreigners) affected by a vote, the Swiss nation (i.e. all Swiss citizens), all eligible voters (who are of age), voters who actually go to the polls to vote on a specific referendum, and the majority who prevail on a specific referendum, often comprising only 15 to 20 per cent of the entire population affected by a new law or constitutional amendment. This doesn’t mean that votes with a low turnout should not be binding. But we should be wary of absolutizing such a "majority decision" as an infallible expression of the will of the People.

The passage of several constitutionally problematic initiatives prompted civil society in Switzerland to take action in 2016. An alliance of rather small associations, organizations and individuals, including Operation Libero, a movement that has by now made a name for itself throughout Europe, opposed the SVP on one of its core issues. The party had launched a so-called "Enforcement Initiative" because it felt the Swiss parliament had not gone about enforcing a prior initiative to expel foreign criminals radically enough. The referendum was extreme not only in terms of Swiss policy on handling foreigners; it was also tantamount to an attack on the separation of powers, as it would have curtailed the powers of parliament and the judiciary. The civil society alliance took the offensive in the ensuing referendum campaign, refused to accept the populist narrative and focused its campaign not on foreign criminals in Switzerland, but on this looming attack on constitutional democracy. And it worked: at the end of the day, almost 60 per cent of the voters rejected the Enforcement Initiative. The same story played out in November 2018 when a similar alliance ranging from human rights groups and researchers to trade associations fought down the SVP initiative "Swiss law instead of foreign judges" with the support of two thirds of the voting electorate.

This is the kinds of political engagement that is needed to defend liberal democratic values. One of the weaknesses of direct democracy in Switzerland is that these values can be jeopardized by referendums. One of its greatest strengths is that the people defend these values time and time again.